Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 9444385" data-attributes="member: 725">He didn't 'make' $40 million, that's what he 'sold'. Minus KS costs, credit card transaction costs, actual products that were sold, people paid, offices run, etc. Which is a LOT when you talk about almost 189k backers, they shipped 1,605,465 lbs worth of packaged product...It wasn't just multiple Premium Hardcover books, epubs and audiobooks, it was also 8 boxes of 'swag' for tens of thousands of backers. They created 64 new products just for the KS. There's a whole company behind that KS, lots of people that need to be paid for a whole year, office space, storage space, etc. They got a whole new warehouse: <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-four-secret-novels-by-brandon-sanderson/posts/3840325" target="_blank">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-four-secret-novels-by-brandon-sanderson/posts/3840325</a>That was not $40 million in the bank for Brandon. That was a whole lot of liabilities that first needed to be delivered. Also keep in mind that the KS would seriously cut into his regular books sales. Cutting out a lot of middle men in the process is lucrative for B though. But it wouldn't be the first KS that would underestimate how much delivering product would cost... My best guess is that he grew his Dragonsteel company significantly instead of rolling in the money like Dagobert Duck... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />This $11 million KS is not run by B or his company (Dragonsteel) directly, it's done via Brotherwise Games, who have been making Cosmere products for a while now (miniatures and board/card games). So first paying for game development, designers, writers, illustrators, layout artists, playtesters (?). Then producing the actual product they sold here, the piles of books, decks, minis, and dice. They will also be paying people to make their RPG/products for a couple of different VTTs (I know of Roll20, Demiplane, Fantasy Grounds, and Foundry). Then they'll probably pay a license fee for the IP and possibly and writing work B did for them, the rest of the money stays at Brotherwise Games. This is as I understand it (details might be different). They were working on this for two years already and this KS includes a product for 2026, so this $11-$12 million needs to cover the cost of 4 years of work, besides physical and digital products... And those KSs have a serious marketing budget...</blockquote>

Verification